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Desmond Egan was born in Athlone, in the centre of Ireland. Educated in Irish Midlands; in The National Universities of Ireland at Maynooth and Dublin. Desmond works full-time as a poet.

Desmond Egan has published 23 Collections of Poetry; two of Prose and two Translations of Greek Plays. Collections of his Poetry, in translation, have appeared in book form in: France, Germany, Japan, China, Italy, Greece, Netherlands, Poland, Luxembourg, Croatia, Spain, Czech Republic, Hungary, Russia, Bulgaria – all, in dual-language format. There are also two Documentary Films on Desmond Egan and his poetry.

through the mists around Aphrodite’s mountain
a lookout I’m told could sight the Carthaginian
longships cutting out from Lybia
and that’s the way I’m cupping my hands now to
catch Sicily a glimpse of you

knowing that what lodges in travelling always includes
off-centre things: Thucydides in a traffic jam
the smell of Marsala an actor’s gravy voice as much as
that vast bay of Siracusa beyond imagination
coldblue murderous
where the triremes had thumped and smashed and
drowned slowly like men
dragging down the Athenian dream partly our own
to break the surface again in history’s flotsam
with Nikias’ last speech

and only the sound of a wave away I can hear
the chatter of tourists turning Greek translating into
thousands of soldier sailors moaning dying
in limestone mines too hot then too cold
where caverns dripped despair and beneath overhangs
the shadows were corpses heaped on one another

yes Sicily black Palermo of no music
where there are mountains there is harshness
and the seas all islanders know must foam with tragedy
sure as the Doric skyline of Selinunte

but when we each lug about our happiness unhappiness
and you were only mixing-in your own
with the faces the lives that pass on a path
with the laughs the che bellas for infant Kate
with Scammaca chained to his glasses dentures whistling

with Nina and Pietro smiling from the distance of language
with Enzo in short sleeves lugging like a talisman
his translator’s briefcase through the punic heat
or with a twinkle-eyed grannie dressed like a nun
who hadn’t to hide behind books

memory a scent of oleander the shirt sticking to my back
tyres screeching down the black mafia streets
the lift door to our pension slapping in the darkness

after the reading we sip beer at 2 a.m. in a lobby
and I know that time is already refining crude experience
and will leave a signature indelibly like Euainetos’

so since it’s unlikely I’ll make it back again
that’s how I’ll carry you Sicily in my wallet:
a silver tetradrachm with dolphins leaping
around your Arethusa head

CRETE

Through centuries of waves
to the bottom of europe where
it arises
out of the rising flood
remote
brown faience
challenging
light’s honeyed vertigo
reality
spinning
(memory’s knossos
the rustling labyrinths)
as in the nebula of a dream

a farmer, gripping, stares off the rail
leather leggings, breeches, harsh face
axeing together the wind:
a bronze land
tentacled there

rubbing the sleep from sleepless eyes
ship
measuring time with its engines
gliding
towards that amber
the groves of ancient cicadas
the fertile waves.

PHAISTOS – the new place

Bonewhite cottages in ravening sun
sluggish sea
tamed now
into a concrete
where villagers splash
and one leathery
peasant kneads
a limp octopus
Kapori, unsmiling.

I carry on in this island whipped by typhoons
Chained to the sea as the waves
Crash against the dam, and I proclaim you.
I scream, until hoarse, your beloved name.

—José Manuel Cardona

These are poems of solid classical diction, keenly aware of the rich traditions that precede it, where mythology, travel and personal memory represent starting points for erotic and metaphysical reflection. —Andrés Neuman, from the Preface

José Manuel Cardona’s Birnam Wood is a superb account of his travels around the world in the service of poetry. —Christopher Merrill

Hélène Cardona’s translations are revelations of language and image, a voice dipped in clear water and wrung through her careful hands. —Dorianne Laux

In years, I have not read a poetry more expansive, gripping, and beautiful for the true music of language. I have been enthusiastically revitalized by the recent encounter with the poetry of José Manual Cardona, masterfully translated by his daughter, poet Hélène Cardona. In her hands, Birnam Wood sings to us in a rendering that is lush and passionate. —Rustin Larson, The Iowa Source

When you take down a book by a master poet like José Cardona you are, while reading his work, reliving, at least for a short spell, the magic of the great moderns and ancients. Hélène Cardona’s translation of her father’s work must be the crowning achievement so far in her own poetic career. For he reads in English as poetry, not as mere translation. I can’t offer better praise then this. —Peter O’Neill, Levure Littéraire.

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